As Drone Racing League Evolves, Weaponizing Drones Like ‘Real-Life Mario Kart’ A Possibility

NEW YORK — The Drone Racing League may be less than two years old, but founder Nicholas Horbaczewski is already fielding questions about weaponizing the drones. Yes, like “real-life Mario Kart,” according to the former Tough Mudder executive.

At the annual South by Southwest Conference last month, Horbaczewski followed up his solo presentation titled “Drone Racing: Beating the Hype to Build the Sport of the Future,” by having a one-on-one discussion with SXSW Facebook Live host, Shira Lazar.

Lazar asked Horbaczewski, who recently called the DRL first and foremost a technology company, about what types of questions attendees asked at his session. The Harvard Business School graduate said people inquired about where the sport is headed, possibly layering augmented reality into drone racing and also putting weapons on drones.

“It’s innovation. It’s about what’s coming next. We’re lucky because if you’ve watched sports this year, NASCAR just announced new rules, baseball is looking at new rules. They’re trying to make their sport a little more modern, a little more relevant,” Horbaczewski said. “We don’t have any of that baggage. We evolve the sport every year. We change the rules a little bit. We might put weapons on the drones. We can do that because we don’t have a 100-year history we’re trying to stay true to.”

This week as the Drone Racing League officially rolled out its new Racer3 drone for Season 2 in June, Horbaczewski further elaborated and clarified his SXSW comments but didn’t rule out the possibility of weaponizing drones in the future.

“Our vision for the sport is broad. It isn’t narrowly defined to what we do today. One of the great joys about starting a new sport is you can be incredibly flexible,” Horbaczewski said.

“The point I was trying to make at SXSW was you can expect us to constantly evolve the sport and whether that’s introducing some of the things (attendees at SXSW) mentioned or putting weapons on the drones, those are all possibilities. We started with a shared vision that one of the things we loved is racing video games is really fun. And drone racing is called ‘the real-life video game.’ If we’re making ‘the real-life video game’, it should be like a real-life video game. If you think about everything that makes Mario Kart such a great game, so iconic and lasted so long, the red shell is something people mention all of the time. People sometimes say weapons on the drones, and they’re imagining a little rocket shooting off.

“Something as simple as offensive and defensive options for the pilots to control space or to slow down the leader are all options. Whenever we get some of these suggestions and people are always suggesting really cool ideas and we’re glad they’re excited about what we’re doing, I always have to remind them that all of that requires an incredibly robust platform.”

Fans of the DRL — which is currently filming Season 2 and will air on ESPN in late June throughout the summer — can expect a drone with larger propellers, higher voltage, doubled the thrust and bigger motors but ultimately, more agile than ever before, according to Director of Product Ryan Gury.

“It can lift an object bigger than a bowling ball,” he said of the Racer3.

“(The Racer3) goes zero to 80 in less than a second,” said Horbaczewski, who added that the performance aspect of the new drone will be what viewers notice most when they watch the 2017 season.

The DRL lives and dies by how technologically-sound its drones are, with Horbaczewski even saying just getting the drones to this point without any bells and whistles, where six drones can start and finish a race, “has been a huge technical challenge.” At SXSW, he explained the technical hurdles he and his colleagues had to initially overcome.

“We spent our first nine months living everyday with the fear that it just would never work,” Horbaczewski said. “The happiest day of my experience in drone racing was the day we first tested the technology, and it actually worked. We actually could race.”

While he didn’t say whether or not the technology would include some type of weapons in the future, he did state that the DRL will roll something out in 2018 that fans won’t necessarily expect. What that may be is left up to everyone’s imagination at this point.

“We’re always thinking about what’s coming next for the sport. That’s what’s really fun,” he said.